92 .. , " ' ... " . ' . .u. t'O' NC! r í rou ..AprØ ts Jhe ,righf't!me::to "eJ)J<?Y 8' sunny"trORtCalcruJse! 'Sun. SWim ' $nôrk 1 amtrélax in )v " aqu.amarine ,waters and on beaubful uninhabited 'beâches a'-óng tHê wày. DiscovØ' eolo- :niaI Pa ma,then, depart mà City ,,:00 "transit theC na see the'" San Bias 'I$lan '. Sf ,,'Historic S a....ish M in Gold Potts, ,PlUS the Beautiful Pea Ilstands anä'Primi elndi n Viuages in the Lush Darien Jung"r ", :" ".,' '.' , ',FOr reservatÏòns or'8 free fuII.:ooJor bra.;;' ; "cI1ure""see any 10èal'TR VE,L AGENT,' j mÆi.ilthis , 9upon or" LL -F ,,'I!:' . y . .. . "H'H',' ' tn WaMÏn ton state caH :,(206} 6244$5"- -- ------- . EXPLO 0 <lÐ -VWS AIID 1500 Metropolitan Park Bldg Dept. BPC Seattle, Washington 98101 Please send your new Panama Brochure' NAME ADDRESS CITY STATE ZIP , ome of tbis wot'td's most mONOeRfClL {') Cbt'ístmaa Cat'ds9 delzghtfully fashwned m the Spirit of ChnstmaS Past, with greenngs from Shakespeare, Dzckens, O. Henry, and others, are now available (with many other good things) at astonish, ingly reasonable prices in the new Cahill Catalogue. To subscribe for one year (four catalogues), send $2.00 to: CAHILL & COMPANY 125 Palisade Street Dobbs Ferry, NY 10522 NAME ADDRESS CITY STATE ZIP s Since 1948 thousandS of libraries and individuals have been buymg regular. Iy, you can tool Send a dollar for 20.000 tYPical titles and prices classified m over forty subjects S EDITIONS DESK Y, BOICEVILLE, N V 12412 studying me . . . What's left for you is to study man, your own heart-and truly great writers. But I am a writer of a transitional time-and only suit- able for people in a transitional state" It was to Tolstoy that he sent that famous letter from his own deathbed, begging him to give up his didactic writing: Mv friend, return to literary activity! After all, that gift comes to you from where all else does.... My friend, great writer of the Russian land, heed my re- quest! The dilemmas of Turgenev the art- ist-who was far from being an "art for arts' sake" man-are matched by the bothers of the half-absentee land- owner in public and private life. He was unworldly and generous to his emancipated serfs; they repaid him with suspicion, and, of course, robbed him. Lazily, he left the management of his estate to a lazy and incompetent uncle; lazily, he often left capital pay- ments in the hands of lazier friends On one occasion in 1863, he left the transfer of a large sum to the "lyric poet Fet." The unworldly and erratic F et discovered there were no direct links between Moscow banks and Ba- den, where Turgenev was about to build a large house: In his [Fet' ] reasoning, which reached the Gordian knot and Sesostris (his own words. . .), he had just about decided on Frankfurt. . . but they have florzns there. . . that might not be convenIent to Turgenev (honest to God!). So the days passed-I was expIring-and in Peters- burg the exchange up and crashed. Then the lyric poet F et, completely losing his head, rushed to a banker by the name of Vogan or V ogau (it's spelled differently on the two notes of exchange) -and, throwing himself at his feet, implored him to take 100 roubles per 350 franc (even during the Cnmean War the exchange rate was never that bad!), which the latter agreed to. since at the same moment Akhenbakh and other bankers were giving 367- and sent me the money à trois mois de date, moreover, identifying me as M. Furguheneff. The result of these Sesostri- sian cogitations was pure loss.... Lesson for the future: don't entrust financial Inat- ters to lyric poets. Money was to plague him in his relations with his illegitimate daugh- ter, Paulinette, born to one of his few peasant mistresses. He had persuaded Pauline Viardot and her husband to bring the girl up in Paris and to turn her into an intelligent young French lady But the child, not unnaturally, became jealous of the Viardot children and suspicious of Turgenev's relations with the Viardots. Turgenev was an affectionate, if negligent, Victorian AUGUST 8, 1983 father and was a master of the stern paternal letter . The girl was said to be giddy, and given to petit-bourgeois attitudes. She recklessly married a Frenchman with a small factory, who easily got his hands on the girl's large dowry and ruined her. (The sad story is almost a copy of Flaubert's disaster with his niece.) It was Turgenev's lot to rescue the Viardots when they lost their money at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Some of the most diverting letters of this deeply melancholy man are those that deal with his passionate interest in theatre and opera. He had a sure eye for bad art. He writes of Sarah Bern- hardt at the height of her powers: She i an intelligent, adroit v,",Olnan Vv ho kno\vs all the subtleties of her métier, i blessed \-"ith an exquisite voice, with good schooling-but she utterly lack any na- ture or anv artistic telnperament (for which she tries to suhstitute Parisian lewdness), she has been corrupted bv chic (pourrie de chic), public it} , and posing, she does not have a spark of what is called talent in its highest sense Her carriage I that of a chicken-she has nu silent acting whatsoever-and her gestures are angu- larly piquante-it all reeks of the boule- vard, Fzgaro, and patchouli There is many a social or political portrait in hIS novels that matches this kind of observation. I think of that note on a general "in whom the good- nature innate in all Russians was in- tensified by that special geniality which is peculiar to people who have done something disgraceful." -V. S. PRrl'CHEI'J ßR.IEFL Y NOTED FICTION PILGER MANN, by Russell Hoban (Summit; $14.95). "By now," says Pilgermann, twenty-nine pages into this display of high-tech pseudo mysticism, "I am only the energy of an idea; whoever is writing this down puts the name of Pilgermann to the idea, says, 'What if?' and hypothesizes virtualities into ac- tualities." By now, the reader has probably got the hang of Pilger- mann's notion of English. Whoever is writing it down also writes, under the heading "Acknowledgments" and above the initials "R. H.," that "'Riddley Walker' left me in a place where there was further action pending and this further action was waiting for the element that would precipitate it into the time and place of its own story." "Riddley Walker" hypothesized brilliantly